Author's Note: HAPPY APRIL FOOL'S DAY! I thought I'd post this fic in celebration!
Engorgio!
It all started when Peter walked in on James changing.
Peter Pettigrew had never been a slave to extremity. He was a simple boy who enjoyed simple pursuits. A tasty sandwich. A nice game of Quidditch. An hour spent reorganising his stamp collection. It didn't take much to make Peter happy. He was not a vain boy, either. He knew that his looks would never amount to much. He was short. He was chubby. His face was plain, his hair lacking in the kind of bountiful lustre that women swooned over. He did not mind. He knew his place. He had spent fifteen years in happy acceptance of his own unremarkable appearance and never believed himself to be lacking in anything important.
That was, of course, until the day he saw his best friend's naked form.
It was a cloudy grey Tuesday afternoon. Peter sat alone in his dormitory, having feigned illness to remain away from class for the day. It had been three days since the incident in the dormitory. James had not seemed to care that Peter had spied his firm, sculpted buttocks, his flat, hard stomach, or his big, startling... but Peter had minded. Oh, it wasn't the embarrassment at having accidentally intruded – after all, when four boys shared a dormitory, something like this was bound to happen eventually – it was embarrassment for another reason. For the first time in his life, Peter felt as though he simply fell short.
Several inches short. In fact.
There was nobody around. It was likely that he would be left alone for another hour or so. He sat on his bed, casting furtive glances around the room as though scared that he may have been watched. He picked up his wand, which lay innocently on his bedside locker. Now was the time. The time to achieve glory. And maybe then, he could have James Potter's confidence. Maybe then, Peter could know what it felt like to really be a man.
He pointed his wand downwards. It was now or never.
"Engorgio!"
"What on earth is Pettigrew doing?"
Lily Evans looked up from her game of Exploding Snap, and frowned in confusion at the sight of her classmate, Peter Pettigrew, who had appeared at the bottom of the boys' staircases and dashed across the room in the direction of the portrait hole, looking frantic with worry. He cut a strange figure indeed, as his arms were tucked inside his robes and bunched around his middle as though he were holding a small child out of sight. Not only that, but Peter's robes seemed to have been bewitched to become longer – they trailed across the floor like a bridal train.
"Wasn't he ill today?" said Lily, tucking a lock of dark red hair behind her ear as she watched Peter fling open the portrait door and practically fall out of it.
"Suppose," said Mary, laying a card down on top of an ever increasing pile. "Still, why would he be running around up here like someone shoved a lightning bolt up his bum?"
"Maybe he thought he was better, but felt ill again." Lily suggested.
"Maybe he's training for a really weird wizarding marathon that we don't know about."
"Not very likely."
"Maybe," said Mary, her eyes twinkling with mirth. "He heard that Potter was going to eat a hard-boiled egg, and just had to get down to the Great Hall and cheer him on."
"He's Potter's friend, Mary, not an obsessed fan."
"Maybe he tried to enlarge his willy, but the charm backfired, and now it won't stop growing."
"Of course, Mary," said Lily, raising a cynical eyebrow. "That's obviously it."
"Help me!" Peter cried, as he burst into the hospital wing. He let go of the gigantic weight which he had been holding in his arms and it dropped to the floor with an ominous thud. Pain coursed through his body like fire, and tears sprang into his eyes. "Sweet mother of Merlin, somebody, help me!"
"Mr Pettigrew!" Madame Pomfrey huffed, approaching her newest patient. "I will not permit this kind of shouting and yelling in my-"
She got no further, as Peter dramatically ripped his robes from his body in a fit of desperate despair, and she saw what it was that had possessed him to rush to the hospital wing in such a state of hysteria.
"Help me!" Peter repeated.
A sixth year Slytherin girl who was lying in a bed by the window screamed. A fourth year Hufflepuff boy in the bed across from her vomited into his lap. Madame Pomfrey, on the other hand, had fainted dead away.
And thus, young Peter Pettigrew learned an important lesson about vanity.
